Children Making Cigarettes For Large Tobacco Company

Philip Morris International

CENTRAL ASIA -

On Thursday, it was discovered that the tobacco company giant, Philip Morris International, has been harvesting tobacco in Central Asia by using captive child labor. With all the issues surrounding tobacco companies nowadays, the cigarette maker is going to have difficulty enhancing their public image after being battered by this new discovery.

Philip Morris International is the manufacturer of the popular Marlboro brand cigarettes and has been using child labor in plantations that are ran by contractors in Kazakhstan using them as forced labor, which translates to making them work. This was discovered by a report released by the Human Rights Watch Advocacy Organization on Thursday.

Some of the children being forced to work were as young as ten-years-old and were being exposed to dangerous pesticides as well as hazardous levels of nicotine while at the same time missing months of school.

In fact the report had documented seventy-two different instances where children were working within the contractor plantation during 2009 only. In six different cases the employers has held the children or had kept them as bonded labor by simply confiscating their birth certificates and passports.

The workers were paid one lump sum at the end of the tobacco season, which is a nine month period. Workers were automatically thrown into a situation of debt as a result and then forced to have to borrow money from Philip Morris contractors until the end of the season when they would be paid.

Reports also showed that the workers were forced into doing other work around the farm as well as household work in which they were not paid for. Many of the workers are migrants for Kyrgyzstan and work illegally once their ninety day grace period is over, which is an arrangement that automatically places them at the mercy of their employers in hopes they do not turn them into immigration.